There is an impression abroad in the East--a hazy, vague
impression, it is true, but still an impression--that the
Californian goes about dressed in a slouch hat, red shirt, and
large death-dealing revolvers. California is vaguely pictured as
a land where people go forth at intervals to riotously slay a few
fellowmen, after the slayer has wound up his tumultuous feelings
with uncounted drinks of tanglefoot, taken to the accompaniment
of much strange profanity. Such is the idea of California
amusements which finds lodgment in the brain of more than a few
intelligent Eastern people whose notions of one of the foremost
States in the Union are acquired from lurid word-pictures of
lurid mining camps that never existed, save in the writer's
lurid imagination.

The men who came to California in the infancy of the State
were the pick of the young men of the East, for the most part of
the best American stock, reared in God-fearing and honest
families. They did not leave either their training or their
manhood behind. On the contrary, so universal was the respect for
the rights of others that even in the days when as yet there were
no organized tribunals of justice and every man did that which
was right in his own sight, no miner locked his cabin door when
he left it, and men left their yellow dust lying carelessly in
the rude dwelling, sure that it would be there when they
returned. Such was California in the green tree; and such it is
in the dry.

The Santa Cruz Police Force

The orderliness and sobriety of Santa Cruz is one of its best
features. I know of no place in the United States which can
surpass its admirable record. I doubt if there is one of the same
size which can equal it. The three officers whose pictures appear
on this page constitute the entire night and day police force of
this city of nine thousand inhabitants, and they are found amply
sufficient to police it. I almost dread to put down the plain
facts about this phase of Santa Cruz life, for fear they will be
disbelieved. But they remain facts, nevertheless. The arrests in
the entire city, for drunkenness and crimes during the year 1896
did not average one a week. This includes every sort of arrest
made by the city police. Nor was this due to any remissness of
the force, for a more vigilant and fearless Chief of Police than
Chief Matt Rawle is not in the State, and two more faithful and
courageous officers than Officer Hugh Dougherty and Officer S. I.
Horton it would be hard to find. The few arrests are due wholly
to the almost total lack of drunkenness and crime.

The writer has lived in Santa Cruz for two years. During the
greater part of that time, his duties upon a morning daily paper
took him upon the streets at all hours of the day and night. He
cannot recall in all that time a half dozen instances of drunken
men being on the streets; in all that time but one tramp appeared
at his house to ask for food; and in all that time he was never
called on to chronicle the occurrence of a single crime more
serious than larceny, and but few of them.

Setting aside the unavoidable influx of pickpockets and petty
thieves which comes upon such occasions as the great Water
Carnival week, along with the thousands who then throng the city,
the record of the police docket is practically clean all the year
round. In the two years falling under the writer's
observation no man has drawn a pistol, nor does the writer
believe that a dozen men in the whole population carry such a
weapon.

The sobriety of the people is simply remarkable. There are a
number of saloons, and the custom of wine-drinking is
wide-spread; yet there is not a town of nine thousand people in
Kansas, or in Maine, or in Iowa, or in any other State,
prohibition or not, in which drunkenness is so wholly absent. The
writer does not attempt to explain this state of affairs on any
hypothesis. He is not troubling himself with theories. It is his
business to record facts.

It is absolutely safe for a woman or child, unattended, to
traverse the streets of Santa Cruz after nightfall in any
direction she chooses. Not only is a woman perfectly safe from
danger of harm, but she is perfectfy certain of immunity from
anything bordering on insult. I dwell on these facts not because
they excite any comment here, where they are taken as matters of
course, but because they will help to eradicate from the Eastern
reader's mind the absurd and unjust notion that the far West
is "wild and woolly," that out here we go about with
strange oaths in our mouths, much liquor in our stomachs,
revolvers in our hands and with our souls filled with a great
yearning to perforate some innocuous tenderfoot with leaden
bullets. The truth is that Californians are an intelligent,
cultivated, sober, orderly, and extremely good-natured folk, and
California communities are much freer from deeds of violence and
from drunkenness and disorder than are the most of the
communities of the Eastern States. The writer gives this as the
deliberate result of study and observation and experience as a
newspaper man, gained in work in nearly every State, East and
West, and certainly formed with no bias against the East, where
he was born and spent his boyhood and most of his manhood
years.

It is very true that the record of Santa Cruz is phenomenal,
even among California towns, and much of this is due to the
character of the three men [above]. So swift and certain has been
the capture of rascals great and small, who have attempted to
work in Santa Cruz, that the crooked gentry of the State give it
a wide berth. The reputation of Chief Rawle and his men is well
known to the criminals of the State, and but few of them include
Santa Cruz in the itinerary of their travels.

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